The Reckoning Stones: A Novel of Suspense by Laura Disilverio Page B

parents would never let her hang out with a friend who wasn’t from the Community, so she used to sneak out to meet him in the woods, on the rockslide, or in his car. She’d gotten good at lying to her parents about her whereabouts when she was meeting Pastor Matt—oh, irony—and she put the training to good use to steal an hour here and there with Cade.
    The faint odor of cigarette smoke clung to him. Iris’s lips tingled, as they had when he’d kissed her for hours on end, making her flush with heat, and she put two fingers against her mouth. Like Pavlov’s dogs, she thought, annoyed with her body for its instantaneous reaction to the stimulus of her former boyfriend’s presence. “Cade? What—?”
    “Let’s go into my office, Ms. Asher,” Cade Zuniga said with a meaningful glance at the curious receptionist.
    “Dashwood. Iris Dashwood.” Without another word, Iris trailed him through the carpeted hallways to a corner office guarded by a secretary’s desk, currently empty. “A lawyer, huh? I’d never have guessed. You’ve done well for a boy who wasn’t sure he’d graduate on time,” she said, glancing at the Pikes Peak view from the window before her gaze caught on the photos of a dark-haired boy and girl, maybe four and six, on the desk. She swallowed hard.
    “The DWI conviction didn’t help, either,” he agreed, closing the door. An expensive watch gleamed from his wrist and a band of white on his ring finger testified to the recent presence of a wedding ring.
    “I didn’t know about that.”
    “The night you left.” He didn’t move, but his gaze flicked over her before returning to her face. “You’re looking well. Beautiful.”
    “And you. Well, I mean.”
    “It’s good to see you. Really good. I worried about you.” He paused and the tip of his tongue moistened his lips. “I would have gone with you, if you’d told me you were going.”
    Exactly why she hadn’t told him. “You couldn’t. Your sister, your grandfather—. How’s your grandmother?” Cade had been raised by his grandparents after the courts took him and his sister away from their parents. Cade’s mother had later kicked her drug habit, but Cade and his sister had remained with their grandparents.
    “Still kicking. Still the church secretary, even though she’s pushing eighty. The fathers make noises about her retiring now and then, but the parish would fall apart without her and they know it.”
    Iris smiled at her memories of the four-foot-nine dynamo, her thick hair pulled into a low bun, laying down the law to her husband and Cade. She could easily imagine her bossing the priests around. “Say ‘hello’ to her for me.”
    “Aw, hell.” Cade rubbed a hand down his tanned face and moved toward his desk. As if the movement had snapped him back to the present, his voice assumed a professional overtone, less raw, more distant. “Bernard said you were asking for Susan Tzudiker, so obviously you didn’t come here looking for me.”
    “I did if you’re my father’s lawyer. How did you end up representing him?” Without waiting for Cade to ask her to sit, Iris settled into a squashy blue chair positioned in front of the desk. She shifted it so she wasn’t gazing directly at the photos of Cade’s children. Reaching out, she let her fingers trail along the smooth bird’s eye maple of the desk before dropping her hand back in her lap.
    “When Susan left, his file came over to me.”
    She fixed her gaze on Cade’s face. “He didn’t do it.”
    “He told you that?”
    “He thought I did it.”
    Cade didn’t express the surprise she’d been expecting. “Even though he confessed, I had trouble thinking of your dad as the violent type.”
    “He wasn’t. He’s not. I—we—need to get him out of prison.”
    “It’s not so easy, Mer—Iris.”
    “Can’t you file an appeal or get them to re-open the case or something?”
    “Not without new evidence.”
    “But he said—”
    Cade was shaking his